Series - A Honeyed Poison
Chapter I - I Am Lord Voldemort
Lord Voldemort?" McGuinness repeated distastefully. "Is that the best you can come up with, eh?" He smirked, revealing uneven teeth. "And when did you become any kind of nobility, your 'lordship'?"
Padraic McGuinness was walking the line... he didn't know how close he was to being added to the list. Later events would put taking care of him at top priority, however.
"Yes. I've resolved for years to dispose of 'Tom'. Don't you understand? Who would possibly be intimidated by the 'Dark Lord Tom Riddle'?" Tom answered impatiently.
McGuinness shrugged. "Who'd you want to scare?"
Oh, what an ignoramus. Why did he surround himself with people of such calibre? He'd be sure to find much more influential and intelligent friends once he was free of his bindings to Hogwarts and this frivolous young adult society. Tom masked his disgust as he watched McGuinness chew clumsily at the tip of his already quite mutilated quill. Perhaps he'd talk to Shipley and Couwenberg... they, at least, had some proper sense and pureblood pride and would appreciate his motives.
Tom snatched up the piece of parchment covered black with tried and failed rearrangements of "Tom Marvolo Riddle" and stalked off through the low, dim, and green-tinged common room. "What?!" McGuinness called after him.
Tom tossed his tired House robes at a chair. As he hadn't been looking, it hit, rather, a stack of books on his ebony wood desk, which toppled and knocked an open bottle of "Black Magic" ink into the ancient, copper-finished mirror.
"Damn --" he cursed, grabbing his wand to clean up the mess. The streaks of black that had splattered the mirror proved difficult to remove. For a moment Tom stared at himself in the darkened reflection. He forgot, temporarily, of the increasing puddle staining his belongings. Lord Voldemort. Right now he looked very much the part of a powerful sorcerer. His green eyes were hooded and his angular jaw was set. His usually tidy, prefect hair hung over his forehead. Someday, he said quietly to himself, wizards all over Britain and beyond would fear and revere him for his power. Tom smiled and the expression was more a predatorial baring of teeth
Even as he came back to reality and magicked the ink spill away, Tom was preoccupied. Even since his discovery of his unique genealogy, he had toyed with the idea of carrying out his obviously destined work. At first his goal had simply been to find the Chamber of Secrets and his serpentine servant. Just to have confirmation that he was, indeed, set apart from the ignorant Muggles who had reared him and even the common wizards of the magical world, would have been enough. He'd been researching and combing the castle for years, trying to find the fabled Chamber. But he was fourteen now, and it was firmly set in his mind that once he found the Basilisk, he would use it as the great Salazar Slytherin would have liked... and, naturally, he wouldn't cease his "cleansing" just because he had left school. Who could tell the impressive things that he'd accomplish in Ambition's name? What was ambition without action, after all?
He realized, with a faint spark of worry in the back of his mind, that time was running out... he had a little over three years to carry out his first great world of Slytherin justice. Was that what it was? Justice? He had some to accept, in true Salazar spirit, that Mudbloods and Muggles were very near to worthless and had no right to freely mingle with the gifted. His lips curved in a suppressed smile... this same Fascist sentiment was carrying on, ironically enough, in that same Muggle world that he held in such contempt as well. If ever he admired a Muggle for anything, it was Hitler for his impressive dictatorship. Was their work justice? "But justice isn't what I'm concerned with," he told himself. "Hitler follows through with his beliefs and that's what I'm going to do.. I'll have a Third Reich of sorts in my own right."
He returned himself to his present situation. Growing Muggle regimes were, of course, no use to him. However... there were increasingly disturbing reports of a rising Dark Wizard in the "Daily Prophet" every edition. Grindewald was all the magical media could talk of in early 1940... his exploits weren't as impressive as what Tom read in the British press of Adolf Hitler when he was taking his holiday in that hellish Muggle orphanage, and his goals weren't precisely what Tom was aiming for, but perhaps Tom's path to fame could lead through Grindewald...
He wasn't as shrewd or graceful in his crimes as Tom would have liked, however. His tactics were not far from those of a Saxon barbarian, and he was rumoured to be nearly inhuman, a kind of frothing, raving monster, striking apparently at random but revelling in the ensuing bloodbath and carnage. He was really just an characterless epic beast, Tom though meditatively, an overrated, temporary threat that would be removed by a counterpart epic hero with much pomp and circumstance in a few years of so. His valued traits did not lie in Grindewald. Where was the style in such lack of reason?
No, Tom decided, his path to grander things would be aided by no one. He would be self-made. Alliances were a tricky business, as history proved, and Tom wouldn't stand for his dreams to be influenced by anyone else.
But the time factor... he wouldn't live forever. Well, he reasoned rather optimistically, immortality could always be the final step if everything else went according to plan. Where was the Chamber of Secrets? All these fantasies were useless if he couldn't make his start with purging the school of Mudbloods.
It was late and Tom's eyes were growing weary. He sat on the edge of his emerald-draped four poster bed... something that, in his first year, had seemed an immeasurable luxury compared to orphanage cots. There was time to test out his new name on Shipley and Couwenberg tomorrow, he thought, absently removing his brown leather shoes and tossing on a school issued nightshirt.
What kind of an attitude was that? he asked himself somewhat viciously. He'd been silently ranting over his limited time element, and yet was ready to waste valuable time on sleep at the first test? Tom resolved that he'd read The Unabridged Accounts of Salazar Slytherin through the first three chapters and then go to bed. It was Saturday the next morning and he'd have a little leeway to catch up.
As it turned out, Tom Riddle didn't retire after the third or even the thirteenth chapter. He stayed awake through the brutal small hours of the night, long after his roommates had drifted off, finished it and even went on to begin the architecture section of Hogwarts, A History. There would be many such sleepless nights in the years to come.